Wednesday, May 3, 2017

How To Trace An Image Into Your Bible

Transferring images. How do people do it? There are lots of methods out there. Of course, carbon paper is the most obvious (to me, anyway), but how many of us have carbon paper on hand these days? What other methods are there?

I decided to try a few, and I'm going to share my failures and ultimate success here with you.

I decided to do this very cool hot air balloon design for Colossians 3. I'd seen something similar on Pinterest, but decided to design my own. (Get the Hot Air Balloon design here.)

Charcoal
The first method I tried was printing out my design and coloring on the back with willow charcoal. I'd done this before to transfer images to furniture. But I quickly found out it doesn't work well for Bible journaling. The charcoal is just so messy, and every time my hand touched the paper, it transferred charcoal to my page. It just wasn't working. Luckily, it's easy to wipe off the page.

Willow charcoal for transferring images is just too messy.

Luckily it wiped right off the page.

I-Pad Light Box
Next, I tried using my I-pad as a light box. I put the design under my page and placed the I-pad behind it to simulate a window. It kind of worked, but it was hard to see the design behind the type in my Bible, and my I-pad kept thinking I was touching it, and the page jumped around.

Using I-pad as a lightbox for bible journaling transfer.

I-pad backlighting didn't work so well under the page type.

Crayon/Pencil On The Back
Finally, I decided to try a method I learned in 6th grade: color the back of my design with a black crayon and trace it with a ball-point pen. We have a WINNER! This method was most effective for a good, smooth transfer of the image to the page. (Pencil also works.)

Transfer an image to your Bible: color the back with black crayon and trace with a ballpoint pen.
Works great!

Trace & Color
After I transferred my image, I traced it with a Micron pen (no bleed through) and then I used a regular pencil eraser, and it worked pretty good for erasing the black crayon marks. After that, I colored in the design with good old crayons and used blue Gelatos for the sky. You can learn more about how to use Gelatos here.

Summary
Over all, I think the black crayon/ballpoint pen method is the best I've found. It's cheap and easy. Most of us have crayons on hand. And it just plain works.

Now that I have a tried and true method, I hope to design more transfers for my favorite Bible verses! Look for them in my Etsy shop: MyPorchPrints.